The home ec club is having a blood drive…and scheduling it from 7:30 to 2:30. I have classes from 7:55 to 9:44, from 9:48 to 10:32, from 11:36 to 12:26, from 12:56 to 1:44, and from 1:48 to 2:37. Giving blood takes about an hour, form to cookie. The only way I can do this is if I make a class project out of calculating the rate at which blood is leaving my arm…which I don’t think third-week freshmen are quite ready for. So, just can’t do it.

The problem is, I’m a fairly rare blood type: B+. This is where the guilt comes in since they usually do actually need mine and I’m way overdue to give a pint.

My staff policy handbook clearly states, under “Copy machine usage,” that “All coping must occur outside instructional time.” Apparently I’m not allowed to cope when things happen while I’m teaching — I’m required to totally lose my cool and flip out immediately.

I heard somewhere that if you have a .22 that you like, it’s just fine to give it a prominent place in your gun collection or to take it to target practice now and then.

But don’t carry it around, because you might then think that you should load it, just in case.

And if you load it, you might someday try to shoot someone.

And if you try to shoot someone, you might hit them.

And if you hit them, with a bullet from your .22, they might someday find out about it.

And if they find out about it, they might be annoyed.

I’m kind of hoping that a few schedule changes level out my class lists –  my three main classes are 11, 12, and 18, and the climate is just a bit nicer in the first two.  7th period seems like they’re going to be harder to convince, about the whole math thing, but then, it’s the TAKS prep class; they get placed into that class by needing help to hit the minimum score to graduate.  I can’t really be surprised for them to have a higher percentage of math not being their thing, on the first day.  We’ll get there.

Last hour prep is going to be good in the long run, because I can check out now and then for appointments and stuff…but it makes the rest of the day kind of a long time without a break.

But, overall…not bad.  Not bad at all.

It may look like an ordinary SimCity game, but there’s one big difference: there are no roads at all.  The residential, commercial, and industrial areas have sort of grown up against each other on the backs of some lots, but are only connected by rail.  This means that the only jobs that the Sims can reach by car are a very small number of school, hospital, police, and other government service jobs.  In other words, I’ve created a town where practically everyone uses the mass transit.

This is what happens when I realize it’s the last day before I’ll be busy pretty much forever.

As of noon day 3:

In the last three nights, I’ve gotten 14 hours sleep; 8 hours a night would be 24, so I am pretty much a zombie.

The car needs to go into a shop for something related to power steering, probably a blown pump.  Meanwhile the car is horrible to turn and makes funky growling sounds.  Sears will do it for $380 if I’m right about what’s wrong but the scheduling just doesn’t work out; if I drop it off after training it won’t be ready until midmorning the next day so I’d miss the whole day.  A call is in to a shop near training that offers rides from and to the shop, so…maybe that’ll sort things out, though I don’t know how much more it’ll cost at an independent shop.

Training itself is better than that first day.  We neither started 15 minutes late for the stragglers nor are killing time surfing the internet while the trainer shows us how to play, not set up, powerpoint jeopardy.

We’re supposed to get out early today but I won’t; I’m sticking around to take the 8-12 practice exam since that turned out to be the one I need, of Gen 4-8, Math 4-8, and Math 8-12; of course that’s the one I didn’t take and this seems to be my last chance to take the practice test for quite a while.  True, I could’ve taken the Math 8 job, but it would’ve been double-prep (Pre-Alg and Alg 1) and I’d rather do one thing and do it well.

Major trouble hauling myself out of bed this morning; over a year and a half with no schedule from one day to next (longest exception was two weeks, second longest was a week and a half, the rest were mostly 1-2 day jobs or 3 here and there) is brutal for an insomniac.  Made it here almost half an hour early anyway and then we started 15 minutes late for the stragglers, which is ridiculous because I have, if not the longest drive, one of the top few.  If I can make it on time, anyone can.

Day 1 for core content single subject is tech…thank God.  I can leave my brain idling and still end up functional enough that no one will know (unless, say, they read this…).  With a few exceptions I’ve spent the morning working on my resource list for the coming year.

When school began at 8 a.m., 66% of students reported feeling “somewhat unhappy or depressed.” After delaying the first bell until 8:30, that figure fell to 45%. Likewise, the percentage of students who said they felt “irritated or annoyed” fell from 84% to 63%. (They were still teenagers, after all.)

source

In other words, teenagers are more decent to be around in school when they get a bit more sleep beforehand (and possibly learn more too).

Grad school…including the class that I didn’t finish last semester. I’ve got an exam scheduled for this month, and very few good clear study days left in the semester, to work on projects, with everything else going on.
Moving…have a chance to move into an over-garage apartment, with yard and house access, for $300/month less than my current place. No pool so I’ll probably have to join a gym with pool to replace that, but it’ll still nudge the budget toward balancing.
Work…I took a weekend job to pay some bills. I have a real job lined up which starts in just over a month and a lot to figure out between now and then.
Alternate path program…3-week training is coming up, paperwork is beginning to pile up.
Computer glitches…the problem just won’t completely go away. Sometimes it flares up worse, right now it’s backed off a bit, but it keeps throwing blue screens at me off and on. Trying to avoid needing to buy a new computer but…I can’t help but think that this one doesn’t have much longer.

Somewhere in there I might want to sleep or breathe.

I use StumbleUpon now and then. Every now and then I turn up a site worth revisiting; reasonably frequently, I find something worth poking about in for a few minutes or something that presents a clear one-shot use like a paper or lesson plan topic. It’s a good way to scan through many sites quickly…which means that a site gets a very small amount of time in which to convince me to give it more time.

I also have my screen set up the way I like it. Firefox occupies a rough square a little smaller than the screen’s height on the right, and anything else I happen to be working on or monitoring appears to the left. Do. NOT. Mess. With. This.

I will tolerate a site that messes with this only if I absolutely have to use that site. For example, a common teaching job site in my state tries to open job listings in a new custom-sized window, and because of my Tab Mix Plus settings, the default behavior for a site trying to open a new window is to put it in a new tab. I took up right-clicking to force it into a new window while I was job searching, when I remembered. When I didn’t…I tolerated it because I had to, because many districts including some with a drivetime worth considering from here use only that site and many others use it extensively.

When I am Stumbling Upon your web site, I have no such commitment to it. My initial attention span when I’m Stumbling is about three seconds because I know that unless your site interests me in that amount of time, I can find something just as good or better in a click or two without even trying. Therefore, if it forces Firefox to reize itself, I will Stumble away before I even see what your site is about. (Note: This also applies to splash pages, because I will not click here to enter your site when I can click without having to move my mouse and have similar or better odds of getting to something interesting. Ditto for anything featuring the word “loading.”)